The illegal shanghaiing of home-based day care providers into a government employees union has attracted the attention of the Small Business Legal Center at the National Federation of Independent Business. It filed an amicus brief with the Michigan Supreme Court requesting that the Court grant the Mackinac Center Legal Foundation's appeal in the Loar v. DHS lawsuit challenging the forced unionization.

In its brief, the NFIB notes that "child care providers are private businesses and not public employees" and that allowing unionization in these circumstances "takes a large step down a slippery slope where other private businesses and employees are rendered 'public employees' merely because they benefited from a State subsidy." Mackinac Center Senior Communications Director Michael Jahr and I presented a similar argument in our Wall Street Journal Op-Ed on this case, where we asked: "Who will be next? Grocers? Landlords? Doctors?"

NFIB has 350,000 small-business members nationally and 10,000 in Michigan. It notes small businesses employ 99 percent of the employees in this country and are responsible for two-thirds of the job growth. A copy of the NFIB's news release can be found here.

"At a time when families are struggling and jobs are leaving the state, we find it unconscionable that a state agency would aid and abet the diversion of taxpayer dollars into big labor's pockets," NFIB/Michigan State Director Charlie Owens said, according to WEYI-TV25 in Saginaw.

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